Rowers are hardly known for their ostentation but the unveiling of Team GB’s
Olympic crews on Wednesday, in the ballroom of Windsor’s Harte & Garter
Hotel, felt unusually grand.

“Ambition” was the mot du jour as Britain’s self-styled “greatest team” spelt out their aspiration of six medals at the Games. For Bert Bushnell and Dickie Burnell, who claimed gold in 1948 in the capital’s age of austerity, the occasion would have been unrecognisable.

The names of Bushnell and Burnell are to be propelled into public consciousness later this month, through the BBC One drama Bert and Dickie. Such glamorisation of rowing is without precedent. While there is, admittedly, a finite cinematic merit in the spectacle of two men sculling down a flat-calm river, it is the backcloth to their accomplishment that has captivated the commissioning editors. And little wonder, when out of the ruins of post-war London, two disparate souls — one a shipbuilder, the other a gentleman of impeccably upper-class stock — combined to cross social tensions and economic upheavals to deliver a signature Olympic moment.

Their very struggle crystallises the Olympic ideal. Indeed, the programme’s broadcast could scarcely be more timely, in its reminder to a still-sceptical public of the privations of ’48 and the Games’ power to unite. It serves both as a paean to a noble past and a celebration of the present.

To suggest that Bushnell and Burnell were thrown together would be to understate their most unlikely partnership. While Bill Lucas and Sam Townsend, Britain’s 2012 duo in the double sculls, have been training in tandem for months, their predecessors in 1948 only joined forces six weeks prior to the opening ceremony. Their reputation as an odd couple swiftly settled. For a start, Bushnell stood just 5ft 9in, dwarfed by his sidekick’s 6ft 4in frame. The difference in stature was accentuated by their sharply divergent backgrounds: where the young Dickie had followed the classic rower’s pathway of Eton, Oxford and the Leander Club, Bert had spent his teenage years as an apprentice at Southampton Docks, saving up £40 for his own sculling boat.

“There was class tension all right,” Bushnell disclosed later. “And it came from me being bloody awkward.” Burnell was more measured in his recollection, writing in 1952: “Our respective weak points cancelled themselves out, and our strong points were complementary.” The verdict is echoed by rowing historian Christopher Dodd, who says of Bert: “I suppose he had a chip on his shoulder about the upper classes, academia, and the division that existed in the sport. But I don’t believe he held any type of antagonism towards Dickie.”

Even the more physically imposing Burnell weighed a mere 13 stone – sylph-like, compared to the heavyweights paraded in Windsor – and yet little more could be expected of men who had endured eight years of rationing. Rapidly, their respective roles in the boat were assigned: Bert as the pilot, Dickie as the strategist. The designation would yield reward come the Olympic regatta itself, once the two had completed a lungbursting six weeks of training.

Curiously, the course for their races at Henley was technically 200 metres short, but the fact that it went against the stream was deemed to make up the difference. Burnell, ever calculating, decided early upon an audacious but highly risky route to a gold medal, where the British double would deliberately lose their heat against the French to avoid meeting Denmark, their main rivals, in the semi-final. The ensuing repechage provided an extra race to reach competitive sharpness and smoothed their progress to a final where, sure enough, they encountered the Danes.

The race pivoted upon a moment where Bert noticed the Danish bowman looking across anxiously at the British crew. In a flash, he called out to Dickie “Now!”, and they pulled clear to win by two lengths. These dramatic seven minutes were captured best by Burnell, then moonlighting as rowing correspondent for The Times. His article is endearing in its attempt to be dispassionate: “In the double sculls, Bushnell and myself, of Great Britain, won safely from Parsner and Larsen, with Uruguay third.”

Their triumph represented a high-water mark for British rowing, magnified by this country’s futile pursuit for another gold until Steve Redgrave and his coxed four bucked the trend in 1984. But the improbable postscript to their story, that elevated it close to the realm of fantasy, was saved for the after-party. The meal at Henley for the Olympians dissolved into acrimony, with bread roll fights and worse, as the Americans objected to the quality of the food.

Among their number was a pretty 18-year-old blonde whom Bert succeeding in asking on a date. Her name? Grace Kelly.